Poor Phil the Forecaster is still getting fired in today’s strip and Alex (the bearded news director who is probably supposed to remind us of smarmy John Darling regular Reed Roberts) seems awfully chipper about replacing him with an unpaid intern. Firing Phil as a cost-saving move (rather than for a variety of good reasons covered below) tells me that Channel One will soon be one of those stations that airs Family Feud reruns in primetime. Alex might want to start worrying about his own position.

That Phil remained Channel One’s weatherman into 2017 is remarkable, in both positive and negative ways. He debuted in Funky Winkerbean in the mid-70s, giving him a 40+ year tenure at Channel One that would be a legitimately impressive career in real life.

He also kept the job for decades despite the running gag that he was terrible at it. And if Brenda Harpy is to be believed, he also kept the job despite being a certifiable nutcase who engaged in terrifying workplace violence on at least one occasion.

Bleh, it’s the same thing he did in the “Cindy Gets Fired” arc, except much less sexist. At least with that one I knew who the hell Cindy was, unlike with these JD characters who I don’t know at all. This Batom guy sure does like to re-visit things though, doesn’t he? Lisa, high school, comic strips he deliberately killed out of spite…the list is endless. Perhaps someday he’ll get around to re-visiting one of his seven hundred dangling plot threads, if he can ever stop dicking around, that is.

Funkytime Crankshaft is a silent, immovable, lump of a potato man in a wheelchair, only capable of squinting through heavily lidded eyes at the people crouching down in front of him to narrate their actions condescendingly.

It’s a good thing that only people like us read the strip. Otherwise, there’d be a lot of baffled people wondering how the idiot being fired is and why they should care. We still don’t care that he’s being fired but WE know who he is and why they’re replacing him with Chullo Boy.

It’d probably be helpful if maybe he’d run a few old JD strips to get readers “up to speed” on who this Phil guy is, but then he wouldn’t be able to repeat the premise five days in a row…and we CAN’T HAVE THAT! FW is so goddamned weird, on one hand you need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of forty years worth of strips, yet most of the time continuity is an afterthought at best. So many paradoxes.